Part III
Arrivals & Departures
Choir Boy
by 'Pemi Aguda
Berger
You want to know the story of the woman who cradles her naked breasts and thrusts them into the faces of strangers? Madwoman, you call her. But what do you know?
You want to know if hers is the story of the grieving mother: the mother whose baby entered the world quiet and blue and too well behaved to be alive. If her breasts became so heavy with milk that her mind broke, snapped so badly that she offers her dead baby’s milk to anyone who will have it.
No, that is not her story.
Okay, now you’re asking if hers is the story of a woman so consumed by her own vanity that she turned every man away. If it is the story of a spurned suitor who spoke a sentence to two sticks at three in the morning and caused her brain to scramble. And now maybe she begs every man on the street to look at her big brown nipples and fall back in love.
But you’re wrong again, that’s not her story.
I’ll tell you her story. But first I have to tell you my story. I am not happy to tell it, but everything is connected. Isn’t every story dependent on another story? Isn’t everything connected?
Please be patient, I will tell you my story. Then I will tell you hers.
It was one of those Friday nights when that big church had their monthly services. The roads were blocked as usual. I sat in that danfo with as many people as the conductor could convince to enter — they were up to six in one row. We were headed to Berger, where my own church was having a night program for the choir members. Mm-hmm, I was a chorister.
No, not anymore. But I am coming to that. Calm down, please. You are the one who has asked for the woman’s story. Every story is connected.
I used to sing so beautifully that many people cried. I would stand on that elevated sacred stage with the purple carpet, and as I opened my throat and let the sounds caress the microphone in worship, the people would look up at me, eyes wide and glazed, tears rolling down either side of their open mouths like brackets. It is the closest I have ever felt to a god.
But that night, stuck between a smallish woman, unnervingly still, and a snoring man, I could feel the frustrations of the whole bus. It was palpable in the humid night air hanging over us in that dark bus. The lights from the phone screens reflected on the exposed metal roof and played tricks on my tired eyes. People sighed, hissed, and cursed Lagos, the church, the air, and even their parents for birthing them in Nigeria.
I wasn’t as bothered as most on the bus; I was going to be early for my program no matter how long we were stuck in traffic. My plan was to get to church early, pray for an hour, then practice some new songs before others started coming in. Let me tell you, my friend — things aren’t always as they should be, you know? See, whenever I got off that stage in church, I became regular. I don’t understand it. Segun, who didn’t make anyone cry when he sang, whose alto sounded like a broken blender — he was the choir director. He was the one fucking all the tenor girls.
I’m sorry; I don’t mean to shock you. I’m just saying it as it is. How did I know? Well, because I am — was — that guy who all the girls confided in. The one who goes unnoticed in the corner of the room until someone else breaks their heart and then they realize, Oh, this one has the perfect shoulder to receive my tears, and his ears are just small enough to hear my secrets and keep them in.
I’m not distracted, I’m getting there! I’m coming to it. You should know everything is layered, don’t ask for an abridged version — you owe it to the story.
So, everyone was tense and uncomfortable in that sardine tin of a bus. It smelled too, like the sweat and exhaustion of the whole week. Nobody complained when the driver decided to try a short cut, a corner-corner road beside Road Safety. You know it? No, the one after the filling station. Yes, that one.
Anyway, it was that fat policewoman sitting in front who suggested it. So, even if we had to pass a one-way to get there, she was going to be our golden ticket. Or can police arrest police in Lagos?
Can you tell when you are about to enter trouble? Can you? Me, I can’t. Even when I had that accident last week, it was because I didn’t see the okada coming. Everyone asked me: “How were you hit by an ordinary okada when you could have jumped out of the way?” I have no answer. I think my survival instincts go numb instead of peaking when danger is around.
Anyway, the conductor jumped out of the bus and directed the driver away from the crawling thread of cars. The gap we created was quickly filled by other hungry vehicles. Even when the smallish woman tensed further, folding herself closer into her body as if trying hard to make no contact, my senses were not triggered. And when the snoring man jerked awake, I assumed it was the sudden increase in speed. I went back to my phone.
It wasn’t until the first person demanded to know how the street we were on linked to Berger; until the conductor jabbed his elbow into the man who tried to reach around him to open the door; it wasn’t till we pulled onto the dirt road with no lights that my hands started to shake.
Suddenly, the bus was full of noise. There were many plaintive cries to Jesus and Allah, and some to the driver and conductor. Someone demanded that the policewoman do something but she stayed quiet. So quiet.
Everything happened quickly after that. I started to text someone — anyone — to tell them I was being abducted, but the bus had swung into a compound. Figures appeared from the shadows to lock the gate behind us. I did not feel like it was quite happening to me yet, it was too surreal — like I was watching a bad Nollywood movie.
And then there were guns and many men yanking us out of the bus. Shaking a bucket in our faces: Drop your phones, drop your phones. Nokias and iPhones and HTCs fell into the plastic bucket amidst Hello? and Ha, what’s happening here, is someone screaming?
I let mine go easily.
We were under a large tree with a single floodlight directed downward. It looked like the setting for an outdoor play. I could see the policewoman more clearly then. She was wide. The buttons of her black shirt barely held her breasts inside. The gaps between each button were shadowy ellipses. I turned away. I wondered if she was a real policewoman gone rogue, or an imposter. Those uniforms are so easy to imitate, you know?
“Officer?” the conductor called out to her from the entrance of the bus.
She cocked her head toward some building and headed there herself. I tried to squint past the tree, past the darkness that withheld the rest of the compound from my eyes — but nothing. We were forced into a queue and directed toward the building. Two buff men started to pat us down and check our bags for valuables. I saw more phones, iPads, and other devices I didn’t recognize. There was a bottle of wine. Another man stood behind, collecting bank cards and asking us to write down our PINs.
The queue moved slowly. I tried to make a mental list of all the items in my bag. Some woman in front of me had tried to do a physical appraisal of her bag’s contents and got slapped by the driver, who had now joined the party. He was a tall man who walked stooped over; he had a toothpick hanging from his mouth. He never said a word.
My Bible. My song notepad. Some music sheets. My wallet. About two thousand naira? Two bank cards — one empty, the other still bursting with my administrative assistant salary that had been paid only the week before.